During the last week, especially the last couple of days, I’ve been grading (some people who speak an aberrant form of English call it “marking”) final examinations and term papers. Most of my students do good work (some do excellent work), but quite a few papers, even the very good ones, exhibit simple errors that should never have made it to the printed page. Before I get too far away from these papers, and get into other pursuits, I would like to offer the following advice to my future students. I don’t wish to “rag on” or embarrass my current students, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take in order to help future students. Of course, I will not identify any particular error with any particular student. These items appear in no particular order.

MATTERS OF MECHANICS AND STYLE

Problem words. One of the biggest headaches that I get when grading student papers is wading through the morass of misused words. I eagerly desire for you to expand your vocabularies, but new additions to your vocabulary should be used carefully and correctly. Misusing fancy words does not make a good impression. (Just ask Grete about me stumbling over “ratiocination.”) Here’s a short list of words abused by my students in this last round of term papers:

• Reference, which is not, as many students seem to think, a synonym for refer to
• Allusive, illusive, and elusive; almost every time I see one of these words, the student really meant one of the others
• Quote, which many, many writers—not just my students—incorrectly use as a synonym for quotation
• Excursus, which is not synonymous with discussion
• Hebrew, Hebraic, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, and Judaic are not synonymous with one another (I’m not even sure that Judaic is a real word, although Judaica is), and need to be used with care and with as much precision as possible
• Posit, which is not the same as argue, and is in fact well nigh its opposite

Learn to use commas correctly. Of all the mechanical errors I see in student papers, comma errors are the most common. If you are at all confused about comma usage, consider reading Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Learn to use quotation marks correctly. In particular, learn when to use double quotation marks and when to use single quotation marks. The rules for this vary among English-speaking countries; in my classes, use the American convention of double quotation marks for almost everything except for quotations nested inside other quotations. Never use the same type of quotation marks for a nested quotation and the quotation that contains it.

Learn how to type on a computer. I’m surprised at the number of students who still use typewriter conventions when preparing term papers on computers. Do not substitute two hyphens (–) for a true em dash (—); instead, learn what to do on your system to type the em dash. Learn how to make your word processor use true quotation marks and apostrophes; do not substitute inch and foot marks.

Learn how to follow a style guide. In my classes, I require students to follow the SBL Handbook of Style. This really shouldn’t be difficult, but I’m constantly having to mark students’ citations as malformed, or correct their placement of footnote reference marks.

Try not to end sentences with prepositions. Usually, it only takes a moment to rewrite the sentence such that the prepositional phrase stands earlier in the sentence. Also, try to avoid strings of prepositional phrases.

Number your pages. Learn how to use your word processor to add automatic page numbers. Also, learn how to suppress the page numbers on page 1, and how to restart page numbering appropriately if you’re going to include a cover sheet.

Learn what dangling participles are, and make sure you don’t use any. Incorrect: “Reading through these papers, they frequently use dangling participles.” Correct: “Reading through these papers, I was dismayed by the frequency with which my students use dangling participles.”

Don’t use gender-exclusive language unless you really mean it. Every semester, I’m amazed at the number of students who still use words like “man” and “mankind” as if they were generic. I suppose they’ve been brought up with a steady stream of such language in their churches. As a matter of clarity in writing, I consider gender-exclusive language (when the writer doesn’t want to be gender-exclusive) to be a grammatical error at least as egregious as dangling participles and misplaced prepositions—never mind the ideological dimensions of this issue, to which I am also quite sensitive.

MATTERS OF ARGUMENTATION

Use secondary sources appropriately. One of the most common reasons that my students earn lower grades than they could is that they rely on scholars as authority figures instead of as guides to understanding a text or topic. To be sure, scholars often have access to information that student’s don’t, and that students don’t have the ability to acquire in short compass. However, I read too many student papers where the students simply “take a scholar’s word for it” and do not seem to ask—or, at least, their papers do not demonstrate that they asked—about the evidence and reasoning that led that scholar to the relevant conclusion. Treat what you read in a commentary the same way you treat a suspicious e-mail: check it out. Admittedly, this isn’t always practical, and there might indeed be cases where students just have to assume that some particular statement by a scholar is correct. Most often, this pertains to specialized data when the student doesn’t have linguistic access—or library access (though this is a pale excuse these days, with inter-library loan and the internet)—to primary sources. If we are talking about interpretive judgment calls, though, you have to penetrate beyond “Scholar X said P.” Find out on what evidentiary basis Scholar X said P, and then evaluate for yourself whether P is the correct conclusion to draw from the evidence. That’s when you’ve crossed the line from summary to analysis, from cut-and-paste to critical thinking.

Beware of false dichotomies and unwarranted assumptions of default values. These are distinct but related problems. It’s easy to reduce the possibilities on some question or other to just two: either A or B. All of us can fall easy prey to such reasoning. Beware of it, though: sometimes there are more than two possibilities, and sometimes the multiple possibilities are not mutually exclusive. If there are two obvious possibilities, and you can’t establish that possibility A is correct, that doesn’t make possibility B correct by default. “I can’t prove A, therefore B” doesn’t hold. You still need to support B with positive evidence in its favor, not (just) with a lack of evidence in A’s favor.

Attribute ideas to those who hold them. In this category, students often fall into one of two traps. One, the less common, is attributing ideas to books, or even to series, rather than to authors. The Word Biblical Commentary, for example, does not “think” or “believe” or “state” anything, although the author of any particular WBC volume undoubtedly does. The other, more common problem arises when students treat ideas as free-floating, as in phrases like “It is thought …,” to which I always respond, “By whom?”

Beware of unexamined assumptions. I’m troubled by the frequency with which my students make debatable—and sometimes quite dubious—claims without actually providing any evidence or reasoning in behalf of these claims, and then use those claims as the basis for further argument. Don’t assume that your reader agrees with you or shares your value judgments. I do realize that there are physical and logistical limits to what you can do in a single term paper. Nevertheless, if you’re going to build part of your term paper on a debatable claim, at the very least you should include some acknowledgment that the point is debatable, and some rationale for why you are choosing that particular side of the debate.

THE END OF THE MATTER

Proofread. Don’t turn in your first draft as your final paper. If you haven’t proofread your paper at least two or three times, it’s not ready to be turned in. Many of you will find it helpful to ask a friend—a friend with good grammar and spelling!—to proofread for you as well. Poor writing distracts your readers from the point(s) you want to make. It also detracts from your grade. You can improve both your grade and your communication by proofreading.